Lepton flavour violation in realistic non-minimal supergravity models

Abstract

Realistic effective supergravity models have a variety of sources of lepton flavour violation (LFV) which can drastically affect the predictions relative to the scenarios usually considered in the literature based on minimal supergravity and the supersymmetric see-saw mechanism. We catalogue the additional sources of LFV which occur in realistic supergravity models including the effect of D-terms arising from an Abelian U(1) family symmetry, non-aligned trilinear contributions from scalar F-terms, as well as non-minimal supergravity contributions and the effect of different Yukawa textures. In order to quantify these effects, we investigate a string inspired effective supergravity model arising from intersecting D-branes supplemented by an additional U(1) family symmetry. In such theories the magnitude of the D-terms is predicted, and we calculate the branching ratios for $μ\to eγ$ and $τ\to μγ$ for different benchmark points designed to isolate the different non-minimal contributions. We find that the D-term contributions are generally dangerously large, but in certain cases such contributions can lead to a dramatic suppression of LFV rates, for example by cancelling the effect of the see-saw induced LFV in $τ\to μγ$ models with lop-sided textures. In the class of string models considered here we find the surprising result that the D-terms can sometimes serve to restore universality in the effective non-minimal supergravity theory.